The present invention relates to structured communication and instant messaging. More specifically, the present invention relates to utilizing instant messaging to effectuate structured communication.
Instant messaging is a well-known and documented real time communication system. Typically, instant messaging allows users to subscribe to an instant messaging service which handles substantially instantaneous communication between subscribers. In order to communicate using instant messaging, a subscriber activates an instant messaging client component and can send a text message to another member who has an activated instant messaging component. If the recipient is not “online” (i.e., if their instant messaging component is not currently on or active) then instant messages intended for that recipient are queued by the instant messaging client or by the service provider for later transmission once the intended recipient becomes active. Some instant messaging systems also allow subscribers to send images, play audio files, launch web sites, or view video information, such as through a web camera device.
Instant messaging is currently very popular. Current estimates indicate that there are approximately 600 million active instant messaging accounts, worldwide. In the next three years, this is expected to grow to approximately 1.5 billion instant messaging accounts worldwide. Adoption of instant messaging services is expected to grow very quickly in both consumer and business markets. In addition, the number of instant messaging transmissions (i.e., instant messages) sent is increasing steadily. The number of instant messages is currently estimated to be approximately 585 million messages per day and is expected to grow to approximately 1.4 billion messages per day over the next three years.
Despite its popularity, instant messaging suffers from a number of disadvantages. These disadvantages stem primarily from the fact that communication using instant messaging is unstructured. In other words, most instant messaging functionality simply allows a user to enter free form text into a text box and send it to a recipient. Although this is an effective tool for communicating simple messages and dialog between two people, it becomes highly ineffective as the number of persons involved in the communication increases. Even with a relatively small group of people, the communication becomes so unstructured and random that it is almost reduced to a noise level. Therefore, instant messaging is not an effective tool for reaching consensus in a group, or driving convergence of discussions in a group setting.
Driving such consensus, or reaching agreements in a group of people in different locations, is typically done using other known forms of communication, for example, the telephone or electronic mail. For instance, assume that the leader of a team of employees wishes to obtain a consensus on a suitable location for a meeting. Instead of using instant messaging, primarily because of the above drawbacks, the team leader will typically either call each employee to find out that employee's preference for a meeting location, or send an electronic mail transmission to all employees asking them to respond with their requested meeting locations. In either case, the leader must then follow up with all the employees once responses are received.
These forms of communication can be cumbersome. Calling each employee allows the team leader to obtain the desired information, but can take a relatively long time, because the team leader must call each individual employee. While the team leader can broadcast an electronic mail transmission to a group quite quickly, that electronic mail transmission is responded to by the recipients many times over, generating a very long electronic mail thread that is hard to consolidate into a decipherable form. Thus, both of the conventional options have proven to take an undesirable amount of time and to be highly ineffective at quickly resolving questions.
There are also known technologies for conducting structured communications, such as surveys. However, these technologies typically offer web-based solutions whereby questions in the survey are painstakingly authored, as is branching logic for determining a next appropriate question based on a previous answer. Such systems are not well suited to quick generation of a structured communication for introducing structure into group conversation contexts.